the silky arterials. We felt it would never end —

the empty sky, the city that didn’t matter,

holding our breath when we clicked off

the headlamps and ran through stoplights.

Beirut

Beirut

For N

That rusting water tower collapsing

on its ruin was the movie theater

where lovers sat in smoky consternation

while James Bond lit his cigarettes.

The mirrored shopping mall selling

push-up jeans and gleaming watches

used to be the souk, where an old man

sold za’atar for small change.

Here, on the corner, where your

father explained to a gun in his mouth:

he was driving back to the

apartment to pick up the dog you left

behind, here, the apartment given

to the head of the Deuxième Bureau,

because when such a man asked for a

favor, he didn’t ask, and you didn’t say no.

This corner, where the sea shines in the

near distance, where Marianne was shot

through the mouth and wondered, as she

lay, if another bullet would come. Over here,

at that shop where we found the mother-of-

pearl table, the hotel where snipers played

God and the flies on the corpses in the street

rippled when the fallen were merely

wounded, and still fair game. Here,

where everywhere was somewhere else,

and the street signs point to Paris and the

invisible city calls through its sarcophagus

a thousand years, we move like ghosts.

The light is not to be trusted. It has been so

easily redirected. We orient through

the night, following the wind, listening for a

sudden noise, waiting for the taste of ashes.

Legend

Legend

My father’s father rode the rails

west into Grass Valley and buried three children

in the shadow of a tree that spread its arms around his bakery.

Cold nights he saw stars he didn’t

believe existed, and heard wild animals

howling with a loneliness he knew.

Wife dead, every morning

he woke to the bread and chill, horses

snuffling in the dark. He’d starved

before, in Canada, winter so ragged it

killed the dog, and this grief was that

feeling, shifted north into his chest.

The heart is not a diamond pressed down

into something hard like rock, but, rather, the word

my father’s father said to himself

those too-cold California nights when

all he could see was the work ahead of him,

the dead behind —

her name.

He’d say her name.

The Unknowing

The Unknowing

My grandfather was born after the earthquake and

fire, began work at four, buried his mother at six.

Summers he picked prunes in the valley,

sun-seared spots on his narrow shoulders.

He lost an eye. Blew out his left eardrum

in a packing-plant accident.

He didn’t make friends, a luxury

time could not afford, smoked

through college while doubling

as an accountant, dedicating nights to numbers,

pleasure in the orderly arrangement of the known.

A gift, my father was born at the end of the